Miss Fortune (17 page)

“Why aren't you scared of prosecution?'

Long pause.

“Why aren't you scared of prosecution, Scott?”

“Listen, Lauren, they can't do anything now. Hey, I've been thinking that what I'd like to work on is turning my life story into a solo show. Are you down?”

“If you end up doing a solo show about the killings—what do you think is going to happen to you? Will it be the first time people are finding out? I'm a little confused as to why you brought up the killings and now never want to talk about it?”

An even longer pause.

“You know, Scott—I'm a little haunted and freaked-out by you telling me that you've killed these people. I'm trying to figure out if what you've told me is true and what I'm supposed to do with this information. Do you want me not to tell a soul? Do you want me to write about it? Get your story out there now? Later? I'm confused as to what the goal of this is and how I'm involved. I'm just so confused. You killed them—with a gun? Who does the FBI want dead? Couldn't you get in trouble for this now? Help me with this if you can. Hope I'm not making you mad. I don't want you to kill me! JK”

Before I shut my computer for the night Scott sends me his most killer-y message yet:

“You are good. I am good.”

On the way to do my daily check of Scott's Facebook page, I notice a lot of posts about my friend Andrea. Today is the one-year
anniversary of her death. Once I'm on her Facebook page, I start reading all her old posts. Six months before she died it looked like her cancer was in remission.
“God, how I used to dread the monotony of the playground,”
she wrote. Andrea had twin boys who were four years old at the time of her death.
“What a boring wasteland it's always seemed to me. But after all the treatments and procedures I've been through this past year I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to stand on that playground watching my boys play for hours on end. Oh, the bliss of plotlessness.”

•   •   •

The next morning there's an email from Scott with details about the commitment he'd like from me during the run of his yet unwritten one-man show.

“I'd expect you to be there for the rehearsals and opening night. Don't feel obligated to stay for the entire run if it's a theater not near to you. But it would be nice to have you there closing night.

“I'll start it at the Seattle Rep, I'd say the second stage but I think this story is much more of a main-stage production.”

This is the final straw. Not his delusions or demands or lies but the fact he thought he'd be able to get on the Seattle Rep mainstage with a solo show. I'd tried for ten years to get that gig and it was impossible. I've never believed that I could be on the Seattle Mainstage. If they offered to let me perform in the lobby I'd be thrilled. His delusion feels like confidence. I'm a little envious of it, but mostly I'm annoyed.

I push my chair away from the desk and calmly walk down the
hallway to organize Leo's pajama drawer into stacks of winter, summer, and separates.

Before I go to bed I'm on Facebook, and for the first time since Scott contacted me I don't go to Scott's page.

An instant message comes up from him—

“I have some other details that I haven't told you yet because I wanted to see if I could trust you. Are you in or not?”

You know what I could go for right now? A chubby one-and-a-half-year-old falling to the light-jazz melody of “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.”

“Scott, I'm really busy. I don't have time right now. Good luck to you.”

I hold my breath waiting for him to yell at me for being a self-serving, self-absorbed asshole. Or for the sound of a gunshot from the apartment window that faces my office. “FUCK YOU, NUMBER TEN!” BAM!

But all I get is—

“Bye”

Good. The next time I go looking for some excitement, if there is a next time, I want to find a less bossy killer.

The next morning I'm back at the playground with all the usual suspects.

The Euro moms, the Santa Monica moms, the Spanish-speaking nannies, and the redheaded dad. The German mom's braided buns
have migrated to the top of her head, but outside of that it's same old, same old.

Leo runs over to join the Euro kids in the sandbox and I follow. An English woman in a large floppy sunhat, aka Oscar's mother, says good morning to me. The other four mothers give nods and grunts of hello.

“Guess what?” I ask the ladies. Oscar's mother stands up, brushes herself off, and comes closer. She remembers me.

What crazy story am I going to tell? What gossip am I going to spread? The other mothers sense something good is coming and gather around me. My reputation precedes me.

“Leo loves mango. I learned how to cut a mango years ago from a guy who's from Suriname. You peel it in strips but you don't peel it all the way off because he taught me that there's a way to use the peel as a handle that you can hold as you slice the meat of the mango.”

Oscar's mother takes off her glasses so I can see her eyes. Trying to let me know that I don't have to hold back. I can tell the real story. Let it rip. She's listening. She's with me.

“Leo ate an entire mango yesterday. No, actually, it was almost a whole mango. He dropped a piece of it. I'm going to buy more mangos today. They were on sale at Whole Foods. Three for five dollars. I don't know if that's a good deal, but today is Mango Monday and that's what I'm going to do . . .”

The sunglasses are back on; she's backing away from me. They all are. The entire Euro mom pack is backing away from me, looking for a sippy cup to wash off, a diaper bag to rearrange, anything but the graphic details of Mango Monday. I'll save my story about Leo watching ants crawl up a fence post for tomorrow.

I
'm waiting in line for a coffee in Portland. It's my first trip to the city and I'm here doing my show
Bust
at Portland Center Stage. I'm trying to butter up my barista so David will be impressed by how quickly I've gotten to know the neighborhood when I get treated like a regular when we come in together tomorrow.

“My husband and I are trying to figure out a date night, which must sound so middle-aged to you.” At the word “husband,” my sullen, shark-eyed barista looks up from steaming milk, as if he's trying to imagine who would have ended up with me.

“Sorry, I think I gave you the wrong impression, but I have horrible news: I'm
taken
,” I say. He turns around and walks into the back room. He does that a lot when I come in. “I better not hear a gunshot!” I yell after him. He comes right back out. “That's not at all funny,” he says. I forgot I was in Portland, where it rains constantly, so suicide jokes don't go over as big as they do in Tahiti, where they kill.

Usually, our version of date night is “You go out on Wednesday night and I'll go out on Thursday. See ya Friday. Everybody wins!”

David's getting ready to go work in Alaska for the summer, so
we need to at least pretend that we want to do something together. I tell the barista, “I want to get out of the Pearl District and do something really Portland.”

“Go to a strip club.”

A strip club. Oh, that's so Portland barista. I knew he was going to say something like “Make beer out of the yeast in your pubic hair” or “Ride a tricycle down a mountain naked.” I might have been on board with those suggestions, but I can't do the strip club thing. I can't have a casual conversation with naked women dancing in front of me while I give little nods of “nice” as I sip my vodka tonic. Yet I'm so flattered that he thought I wasn't too old and square to handle such a thing, so it sucks that I react by bursting out in nervous laughter. “Oh no, no, no! Oh gosh. Think I'll skip that one. I'd rather tuck my one-dollar bills in your tip jar!”

The girl behind me in line, a pale young chick with pink hair, nose rings, and black eyeliner so thick it makes her eyes look like little pin holes for the light to spill out of her face, sticks her head in the conversation. “Just so you know, I go to strip clubs all the time. I always really enjoy myself. In fact, the girl I got a lap dance from last night just Facebook friended me.”

My barista and she share a “right on” moment before he turns back to me. “I'm not sure what you're picturing but it's different here. Everyone goes.”

“Everyone goes? Oh really? Everyone?! So it's just the Applebee's of Portland.”

The pale chick lends her wisdom. “He's right, everybody does go. Last week there was a blind guy at the strip club I go to. My friends and I figured out that he probably goes for the smells.”

After I'm able to stop yelling “Ew!” I ask her what smells she's talking about.

“Butthole and vagina?”

“Ew!” she yells back. “No! The smells of baby powder, god.” She turns her back to me.

The barista says his mom's book club meets in a strip club. “If I were you, I'd take your husband to Mary's. It's a good one to start with. It's right around the corner from here. Mary's isn't even a strip club; it's just a bar that
happens
to have a stripper.”

Oh ho, ho . . . very clever.

I'm willing to go a lot of places with David. I'll see London; I'll see France. But I'm not sure if I'm ready to go with him to see a girl without her underpants. (But with sexy talk like that I don't see how I'll be able to avoid it!) He would enjoy it, I'm sure, as most men, I think, would, but I'm old-fashioned and think that strip clubs are private activities to be done in a drunken haze and dripping with shame. I've been to a strip club once, and as with most situations that involve fake breasts, it was traumatizing. The only reason I even went was because I had a coupon. (Same reason I tried lotion toilet paper and with the same results: a life lesson about what a person's crotch area really requires for happiness that I vowed never to repeat.)

The details on my first strip club experience are hazy because it was so long ago and so much alcohol was involved. Like all my racy stories, it was back in my twenties during a trip to Vegas that my boyfriend at the time, Mathew, and I took with another couple, Meagan and Russell. Our first night in Vegas, Meagan stepped out of Circus Circus's mirrored elevator in her tight black dress, oversize sunglasses, and shiny blue wig, lit a cigarette, and said, “Remember . . . we aren't here to see the show. We
are
the show.” Russell, in his vintage suit and fedora, would grab her around her waist and say, “Come on, baby. Let's make this playground swing!” Her legs were “gams” or “getaway sticks,” and she was always “baby” or “doll.”

Russell and Meagan thrived in Vegas. Mathew was a bartender,
so he fit in with all the posing and martini drinking. I, on the other hand, wore overalls for most of our Vegas vacation. Meagan offered me one of her wigs to wear to cheer me up, but they just made me look mentally ill.

The first hour walking around in Vegas left me completely depressed. Dino and Frankie must have hired people to walk ahead of them and throw blankets over the dying senior citizens hooked up to oxygen gambling away their social security. Who could feel sexy or powerful in this sad town of sadness? Russell and Meagan, that's who. Meagan's always had a killer body that was known among the restaurant staff as “Meagan's killer body.” Her cleavage was heaving and her ass went badonkadonk-donk. I'd brought a blue fuzzy dress that I referred to as my “Cookie Monster dress” that I could have worn, but I decided not to because I didn't want to look like I was trying to be pretty—in case I failed. My outfit wasn't without its sex appeal. If Mathew stood close enough to me he could look right down into my overalls and see the side of my leg, but only if I'd forgotten to snap all the buttons shut.

An hour later, I needed something to numb out the insecurity of showing up for our sexy couples' weekend looking like a locomotive engineer and I became a full-blown gambling addict looking to cut a kidney out of a Chinese tourist to sell on the black market to feed the nickel slots. We were in line for dinner, and I lied and said I had to use the restroom so I could play the Wheel of Fortune slot machine. “I'm gonna surprise everyone and come back with a thousand dollars in nickels! Because I'm a winner. A WINNER!”

But instead of coming back from the “bathroom” covered in diamonds and with a Cadillac, I came back with not a cent to my name and the shakes. At the all-you-can-eat buffet, I obsessed about how I could get back to the slots. “Don't forget to make a
trip to the nacho station!” the waitress said to us. Mathew, Russell, and Meagan enjoyed the coincidental train reference. I pretended to laugh with the others while I sat staring at the four-dollar tip that had been left on the table next to ours.

The waitress had my number and quickly snatched up the tip. After dinner, we were going to go see Marty “Hello Dere!” Allen. Marty was an old-school Vegas comedian whom none of us had heard of, but we had a coupon for the show and wanted to hear him say “Hello Dere!” at least once. Meagan sat down at a quarter slot machine to play while the guys went to buy cigarettes. She took a quarter out of her pocket and told me to make a wish and ask my guardian angels to bless it. I'm not as into the angel thing as she is, so I just opted to scream, “Put it in! Put it in!” like a seventeen-year-old virgin boy on prom night. She put it in and hit a five-hundred-dollar jackpot. She immediately insisted we divide it up among the four of us so we all could keep gambling. She was sexy and magnanimous, just like Ms. Indiana State Fair. When the guys returned with the cigarettes, jackpot sirens were going off, a crowd had formed, and I was laughing hysterically, jumping up and down and shoveling quarters into plastic buckets. “MEAGAN WON BUT SHE WANTS TO SHARE WITH US! SHE WANTS TO! OH GOD. LOOK AT IT ALL THOSE SHINY COINS! HA-HA-HA! JUST LOOK AT THEM!” Both Mathew and Russell refused to take Meagan's money. Mathew put his hand on my shoulder and said in a calm, low voice, “Lauren, Meagan won.” I shook him off and kept shoveling. “SHE WANTS TO SHARE! SHE WANTS TO! SHE SAID SO!” When I heard Russell say something about how Meagan should save the money to help her pay rent when she got back and how it was nice she wanted to share but it really wasn't fair, we didn't need to gamble to have fun, I stopped shoveling.

The jackpot sirens stopped going off and I could hear the echo
of the sound of my pouring my buckets of quarters back into Meagan's bucket in my shriveling soul.

That was my addiction bottom. It wasn't as grim as most—I wasn't blowing guys in the floor-model toolshed at the local Home Depot—but by the end of my first day in Vegas, I was staggering down the streets in my overalls, screaming for Jesus.

We hadn't even gotten to the strip club yet. That happened on our second night. We drank as many free drinks as we could and went to the strip club. Going with Mathew to a strip club made me jumpy. What if he snapped and an unacknowledged shadowy lust was released and he started having sex with the nearest ATM? Or he developed an immediate and lifelong addiction to strip clubs? As a recent gambling addict, you would have thought my heart went out to a possible fellow addict, but instead the thought depressed the bejeezus out of me. The night held the possibility of being our last one together. No, no. Don't make it too heavy. Lighten up. This is what you do when you're in your twenties.

As soon as we walked into the place I remember thinking, “Oh, this is fine. It's just girls with fake boobs walking around on a bar. That's all. We're all in this together!” But you know what they say: It's all fun and games until someone gets titties in the face.

I didn't really want titties in my face because I'd seen a few men get the service already and you had to sit there with everyone at the bar watching, your hands down at your sides like a dork while you got slapped by boobs. Meagan had kept her Vegas cool since we arrived and had not once sobbed in a bathroom stall, while I'd done it twice. Once after the embarrassing jackpot thing, and once after I saw a lady who looked just like my grandma Irene throwing up outside of a casino. Meagan was an ex-cheerleader from Orange County who was on acid the night she was voted homecoming queen. She wore blue wigs and made out with girls
in hot tubs. She popped pills in her mouth and only after she'd swallowed them would she ask, “What was that?” I was an ex-kleptomaniac from Indiana with short dirty blond hair who was trying not to smoke so much pot since it tended to make me eat bread out of the trash.

When the stripper leaned down and asked if we were here with our boyfriends, Meagan yelled back, “
Yes.
”

“So do you guys want titties in your face or something?”

I started to yell back “Okay” but only got as far as “O-” before I was getting the shit beat out of me by these huge fake boobs. It hurt. It was like getting punched in the face by somebody who was mad at me. It felt like my jaw was out of whack. I handed her my dollar and thanked her. When I looked over at Meagan, she looked completely shocked.

The stripper asked Meagan if she wanted titties in her face. Meagan politely declined. “No, thank you, but you can have my dollar anyway. And have a really good night. I know it's gotta be tough sometimes.” The stripper thanked Meagan for being so cool and turned to me to see if there was anything else I wanted done.

Meagan and I joined the guys back in our booth, and nobody would make eye contact with me. Back in our hotel room I asked Mathew if what I'd done was at all sexy. He turned to me with a sad smile. “It was funny. I will say that.” I took off my overalls and went to bed.

It has been almost twenty years since I've had titties in my face.

I suggest to David that we go to a strip club and, shockingly, he is open to the idea. The entire walk to Mary's it's gushing rain down on us, but we don't care. We are giddy with pre-stripper anticipation. I tell him the “titties in the face” story and we laugh and laugh. He makes me promise to do it again but this time “punch her back!” Ha! Ha! “Hope they take coupons!” Ha-ha!
This is going to be fun because, thank god, I'm married to a feminist man who truly loves women. I'm not worried about him losing his mind over the hot young stripper bodies. His women crushes are Lauren Hutton and Jane Fonda. Not the 1970s versions of these women, but the versions of them in their seventies. Usually a handsome man such as himself would have to meditate naked in the woods for months eating nothing but one grain of rice and one drop of rain in order to obtain the level of enlightenment that would allow him to not only see the beauty of older women but crave that beauty. We are going as a couple to enjoy the beauty and skill of the art of stripping.

There's Mary's! With its classic old-timey bar sign. We open the door, take one step inside, and BAM! VAGINA! It's right there. As soon as you open the door it's a naked girl right there. I mean
right
there. I turn around and try to run out like cat in a bath, scrambling to get David to let me pass. “It's
right
there . . . It's too quick! Too quick! I need to ease into it. I need a hallway or some naked pictures.” David pushes me back in. I knew it. He's already manic with desire. Pushing and shoving to get a glimpse of a naked lady like some pervy dirty monkey. “Lauren, come on, it's raining. Go in.” Or he's trying not to get soaked.

It's early, so except for the two red-faced frustrated men my dad's age sitting on their hands watching a twenty-two-year-old naked girl dance, the place is empty. I grab David's hand. “Okay, here we go. This is happening. We're doing this. One-two-three and
go.
Walk, walk, walk,
just go in
, WALK!” I take the very first seat I see, which is in the front row at the same table as my dad.